OVP: Heaven's Gate (1980)

Film: Heaven's Gate (1980)

Stars: Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Isabelle Huppert, Joseph Cotten, Jeff Bridges, Terry O'Quinn

Director: Michael Cimino

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction...though at the 1981 Oscars, not 1980)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Kris Kristofferson: click here to learn more about Mr. Kristofferson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

While we didn't start this season with John Wayne (I wanted to pick a month with five Saturday's for Wayne given how important he is to the western genre), I made a point of covering The Big Trail this year, which was not the first Hollywood western, but it was the first one to be playing in the field of "epic tale of good-vs-evil" that would be a hallmark of the genre for the next fifty years.  Even after the collapse of the studio system, the western survived well into the 1970's, in some cases because people like Wayne continued to be profitable even as other Golden Age actors fell.  But in the same way that The Big Trail was a landmark for the western but not the first, Heaven's Gate was not the epitaph of the western...but it did mark the end of it as a major, consistent presence in Hollywood.  Michael Cimino's follow-up to his acclaimed (and commercially successful) war film The Deer Hunter was a gargantuan bomb, one of several that would happen throughout the 1980's, and would become synonymous with flops, to the point that when Kevin Costner's expensive failure Waterworld came out, it was nicknamed by the press "Kevin's Gate."  Unlike Waterworld, though (which actually made a lot of money, just not enough to recoup its budget), Heaven's Gate has a weird second life in the decades since, hailed by many as a masterpiece, in some ways akin to what Cimino achieved with The Deer Hunter, and I have spent much of this year looking forward to it, though a little concerned by the 219-minute run time (not a typo-this film approaches Gone with the Wind-levels of patience).  I was curious what the "last" Hollywood western would have in store for me.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is an epic tale focusing on the real-life Johnson County War that took place in the 1890's in Wyoming.  Despite a gigantic, long story, you can actually summarize it pretty quickly.  We have at its core Averill (Kristofferson), who starts the film a promising young man at school, but in a flash forward we understand he's now a grizzled marshall, someone who has seen too much of the world, and is employed in Johnson County, which is seeing a battle between the cattle barons of the region and the burgeoning immigrant population trying to find a hold in the West.  The barons are angry about the immigrants, and want to pin a series of cattle thefts on them, and quickly decide to put bounties on the heads of 125 different immigrants in the area, in hopes of killing them and driving the remainder out.  The rest of the film centers around this conflict, and eventually involves a wide array of figures, including a bordello madam named Ella (Huppert), who is caught in a love triangle with Averill and a hired hand for the cattlemen named Champion (Walken), before culminating in almost everyone involved dying...but the immigrants likely being able to carry on in their homes.  Averill survives in the end, living on a yacht in a proper life that feels unfulfilling...a sign that he left his spirit in the West, never to be reclaimed.

Heaven's Gate became a flop for a couple of reasons.  First, the production is the stuff of legend, with Cimino allegedly having something of a God Complex (it was the 1970's, and we were entering the saturation point of auteur theory between this and Apocalypse Now!'s sprawling location shooting).  He went over budget, and months over deadline.  According to legend, one of the films stars (John Hurt) was able to shoot his Oscar-nominated turn in The Elephant Man during production of Heaven's Gate, it took so long to make.  Cimino would tear down sets for no reason, and the film basically ruined his career two years after being crowned the toast of Hollywood at the Academy Awards.  The film also destroyed United Artists, and caused it to be sold to MGM in 1981 during the tumultuous Kirk Kerkorian years for the studio.  The movie's budget basically made anything short of a Star Wars-style payday to be a flop, and on a $44 million budget, it barely cracked $3 million at the box office (a loss of $74 million when adjusted for inflation).

It's easy to see why the public didn't like the movie.  It's long, and while I saw the longer director's cut, it also doesn't need to be if you solely focus on plot.  There's not a lot here.  The tropes of a western (good vs. evil, the little guy being overtaken by a powerful government, a love triangle between a sex worker and two lawmen with different ethos) are all there, but in the 1950's you could get that done in 100 minutes...and Heaven's Gate does.  In the remaining 2 hours, you largely just see a really beautiful reconstruction of the West.  No extra plot, just pretty pictures.

There's a trend in recent years to only focus on the plot, to the point where many people who are against sex scenes in movies use "is it relevant to the plot?" to argue against certain scenes in movie (we saw that earlier this year with Oppenheimer).  But Heaven's Gate is a solid explanation as to why you shouldn't do that.  Because Heaven's Gate is a good movie almost entirely because of how it looks.  Film is a visual medium first-and-foremost, and Cimino definitely gets good use out of bankrupting a studio.  You see every penny of his work in the production design, costumes, & cinematography, all first-rate and glorious on the screen, with entire towns built from scratch and giving us a lived-in look at the west.  The film's fatal mistake (other than its accounting) is that it casts our star (apologies to Kris Kristofferson, who has had a rough month with me in terms of reviews) incorrectly.  Kristofferson is handsome & genial, but he's not Clint Eastwood or John Wayne-he doesn't have an automatic connection with the audience, and he's too reserved as an actor for us to invest four hours into his character.  It's easy to see years later, when he's now a legend, but Jeff Bridges (who plays a smaller role in the film) would've been perfect for the lead, and Kristofferson would've been a good fit for Bridges' less showy part, but in 1980 that wasn't the star structure that was in place.  Heaven's Gate would change that.  While Bridges would go on to fame, glory, & an Oscar in the decades that followed, Kristofferson would essentially be banished from the A-List after this movie, forced into character parts.  We'll get to one of his most notable ones, and the final western of 2023, in our season finale next week.

OVP: Duel in the Sun (1946)

Film: Duel in the Sun (1946)

Stars: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall, Lillian Gish, Walter Huston, Charles Bickford, Harry Carey, Butterfly McQueen

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Jennifer Jones, Supporting Actress-Lillian Gish)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Gregory Peck: click here to learn more about Mr. Peck (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we discussed last week, Gregory Peck's initial career took off like a rocket, with huge hits such as The Yearling, Spellbound, and The Valley of Decision making him a household name pretty much overnight.  The late-1940's, though, were something of a disappointment.  He starred in another Hitchcock film, The Paradine Case, which was a big flop, as well as the western Yellow Sky and the romance The Great Sinner, neither of which set the box office on fire.  While Twelve O'Clock High and The Gunfighter would bring life back to his career, during this time frame he only had two really notable films.  The first was Gentleman's Agreement, which won the Best Picture Oscar (and got Peck his third nomination) and was a massive success, but one that I've seen before so it wasn't eligible for this series.  The second was one I had heard legend of after reading about movies for 25+ years, but somehow had avoided actually watching: David O. Selznick's infamous follow-up to Gone with the Wind, the soap opera western Duel in the Sun, our movie for today.

(Spoilers Ahead) Based on the novel by Niven Busch, Duel in the Sun is the story of a young biracial woman named Pearl Chavez (played by the very much not biracial Jennifer Jones), the daughter of a white father and a Mexican mother.  After her father (Marshall) kills her mother for having an affair, she's sent to live with his childhood sweetheart (and second cousin) Laura Belle (Gish) on a giant ranch she lives on with her husband Senator Jackson McCanless (Barrymore) and their two sons the proper Jesse (Cotten) and the lascivious Lewt (Peck).  This sets up an inevitable love triangle between the two men and Pearl, with her drawn to Jesse's decency, but clearly there is a hormonal attraction between she & Lewt that cannot be denied in the Texas heat.  Along the way, she tries to find ways of escaping Lewt, including marrying Sam Pierce (Bickford), but Lewt kills Sam, making him a fugitive from the law, but still Pearl can't stop her desire for him.  When it becomes clear that Jesse can save her, even after he's shot by Lewt trying, Pearl understands that the only way that she'll break free of Lewt is to kill him, which she does...but in the process, she also ends up in his arms, their desire in life to be together impossible to deny, even as they're literally murdering each other.

Duel in the Sun was not, it has to be said, Gone with the Wind.  Selznick's obsession with equalling his previous film's success, particularly with the woman he was obsessed with & having an affair with at the time, Jennifer Jones, is kind of the stuff of Hollywood legend.  This was a deeply troubled shoot, and cost nearly $8 million to make & promote, which was basically unheard of at the time, and so despite a solid box office, it barely broke even.  The problem, of course, was that it wasn't Gone with the Wind (nothing is, quite frankly, though Titanic probably comes close enough to earn comparison)-chasing that dragon is the stuff of heartache, even for the man who initially produced it.  The film is tackier, it's less enthralling, and no aspect of the production quite lives up to that film.

If you get past that comparison, though, it's not a bad movie even if it's clearly a "bad" movie.  The film rarely makes a lot of sense, but it goes off of impulse, all id and no ego.  But it's entertaining throughout.  The score is fun, the cinematography is really horny but it works (the cameramen are obsessed with the gorgeous Jones & Peck in all of their carnal lust).  The acting is bizarre, but not boring.  Jennifer Jones, whom I've seen enough of at this point to be able to say she wasn't a very good actress, makes so many choices, swinging for the fences in every scene, but it kind of works with the unbalanced nature of the script.  Save for Beat the Devil, this is undoubtedly Jones' most intriguing performance (at least of what I've seen), and while she's not Oscar-worthy, she certainly is something.  Lillian Gish is a bit bland in the only film that she'd be nominated for an Oscar for (it's a pity it wasn't for The Wind or The Night of the Hunter instead), likely getting it with one deathbed confessional, but overall playing a kindly matron in one of Oscar's worst Supporting Actress lineups.  Butterfly McQueen is playing basically the exact same character she got in Gone with the Wind, channeling Prissy as if that will get Selznick literally back to his original movie (she's the only principle actor to appear in both films).

And as for Gregory Peck?  His casting is...a choice.  I've talked about this a bit, but it's strange that Peck would become most associated with To Kill a Mockingbird, a film where he exudes absolute no sex appeal, because his exaggerated face (big eyes, pouty lips) and lanky frame were used to make audiences thirsty in the mid-1940's, and that's definitely the case here.  He looks hot in Duel in the Sun.  The only problem here is that Peck is not meant to be playing a "sexy math teacher" vibes like he'd play in most of his films of this era, but instead is supposed to be a dangerous "bad boy you make out with under the bleachers" sort of vibes, a forbidden sexiness that you know is wrong but you can't help it.  Peck, though, is not good at this-he's too inherently decent, and playing a villain here who also has to turn you on...it just doesn't work.

Under Capricorn (1949)

Film: Under Capricorn (1949)

Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Michael Wilding, Margaret Leighton, Cecil Parker

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Ingrid Bergman-click here to learn more about Ms. Bergman (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I had an unexpected trip this morning & afterwards a nap that took longer than expected, but if I was able to keep this streak going through pneumonia & 104-degree temperatures three years ago, I'm definitely not going to stop it today simply because of a four-hour car ride.  And so we're going to get a late night (but still Saturday!) check-in with our Star of the Month, Ingrid Bergman.  Last week we talked about Bergman's unparalleled level of box office & awards supremacy with Joan of Arc, which had the actress playing a literal saint, something she was expected to do offscreen in the eyes of the public.  We're going to take a step back from that today with Under Capricorn, the third and final film that Bergman made with our mascot for the year, Alfred Hitchcock.  The pairings last two films had been large successes, both commercially & critically, and are considered two of the better films Hitchcock made before his most celebrated run in the 1950's.  However, I've seen both of those films (Notorious being one of my personal favorite films from Hitchcock), and as we only see films I haven't seen before for this series, we're going to look at the least-known of the Bergman/Hitchcock pairings, one that is probably less known for a reason...

(Spoilers Ahead) Under Capricorn is a strange movie in that in a lot of ways it's not really about anything, but if you want to summarize it into a plot, it's focused on a love triangle (though at least one character is hoping it'll be a square).  Set in Australia, the film has Charles Adare (Wilding), the second cousin of the local governor Sir Richard (Parker), meeting a childhood friend in the form of Lady Henrietta (Bergman).  Henrietta was once a lady-of-society, but inexplicably she married a man of no fortune named Sam (Cotten), who killed her brother & spent years in prison.  The two have found some financial footing in Australia, but Henrietta has become an alcoholic, and only entrusts Milly (Leighton), her maid, to do the work of running the household.  Charles begins to help Henrietta recapture some of her old stamina & glamour, but it comes at a cost-they're falling in love with each other.  A fateful night reveals this truth, but also another one-that it was Henrietta who killed her brother, not Sam, which is why they are bound together forever as he gave 7 years of his life for her crime.  Meanwhile, Milly is fired, & we find out she is using witchcraft (including leaving a shrunken head in Henrietta's bed, and it reads as problematic as it sounds to a modern audience) to try & keep her drinking so that Sam will leave his wife for her (a plan that kind of just disappears).  In the reveal of the affair, Sam accidentally shoots Charles, and is supposedly going to be hanged for it, until Henrietta says that it was she who killed her brother many years earlier, and Charles eventually lies to save Sam, saying the shot was no one's fault.  The three end on good terms, with Charles returning to Ireland.

That might sound like a lot of story, but it's really not as it plays out.  The stakes remain low-the first 70 minutes of the movie virtually nothing happens, and it meanders way too much, to the point of tedium.  When Sam shoots Charles, the stakes somehow don't increase.  The Hays Code requirements of the time indicate that Bergman's Henrietta isn't going to leave her husband, who is a relatively decent if short-tempered man, for the wealthy playboy (however well-meaning), and so the twists are kind of foregone.  This is a pity, because Margaret Leighton's maid could have left us with some genuine thrills, as she's by-far the best character in the movie, but nothing happens there-her dismissal feels underwhelming, almost as if Hitchcock had lost track of his most interesting character.  As a result, Under Capricorn, despite a pretty strong pedigree, falls flat-it has some moments of fun as a melodrama, but it doesn't stand up to the other Bergman/Hitchcock collaborations.

Bergman is one of the last actresses to have a properly uncomplicated relationship with Hitchcock that we'll look at this year.  Hitchock's treatment of women was sketchy at best and horrifying at worst (and horrifying was increasingly the case as his career continued).  We're not going to gloss over that as the series continues, but I do want to point out that at least for Bergman, this was a partnership that she seemed to enjoy & a friendship that lasted beyond their three pictures.  At his AFI tribute, which she hosted, she called Hitchcock an "adorable genius" and in his acceptance speech he referred to her as "Queen Ingrid."  Hitchcock & Bergman wouldn't work together again after this, despite both making films for a few more decades.  We're going to get into the why of that next week as we encounter one of the most, well, notorious scandals in the history of Classical Hollywood.

OVP: Lydia (1941)

Film: Lydia (1941)

Stars: Merle Oberon, Joseph Cotten, Hans Jaray, Alan Marshal, Edna May Oliver, George Reeves

Director: Julien Duvivier

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

One of the more daunting aspects of the Oscar Viewing Project comes from the films of the late 1930's & early 1940's.  This is one of my favorite Hollywood eras.  It is also exhausting when it comes to just how many films were nominated for Academy Awards during this time frame, principally because the music categories had so many pictures that were cited.  The song & score categories could have as many as twenty nominees at the time due to quirks in the Academy bylaws, and this results in at least 100 of the remaining films I have left for the project solely coming from being nominated for a music award in this ten year stretch.  One of those films (up until this past weekend) was Lydia, a largely forgotten Merle Oberon melodrama, cited for its score.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told largely in flashback, after Michael (Cotten) and Lydia (Oberon) meet.  They were once young lovers who could never get the timing right, and Michael has spent his whole life loving her while she has embraced her "spinsterhood" by improving the lives of the less fortunate.  Michael assembles a team of her other former beaus, and they all reminisce about her youth, how she came to romance them all (and then how they left her), and then telling the secret of her romance with Richard (Marshal), where she essentially lived-in-sin with him (there's strong indications they had sex as they lived together in a seaside home despite not being married).  The film ends tragically, with the three men doting upon Lydia but her still in love with Richard, and then when Richard comes, she's ready to forgive him but he doesn't remember her-their love only meant something to Lydia.  She realizes that her life has always been a story of different "Lydia's" and she never truly was herself.

The film is a bit of a bore, honestly.  While I generally like Joseph Cotten, Merle Oberon is a star that has virtually no appeal to me, even in movies I've liked of hers (specifically Wuthering Heights).  Her accent work is dreadful (is she British?  From Connecticut?  Just exceedingly rich?) and the backstory on all of the men is confusing.  Oberon's feelings for all of these men, particularly Cotten, is bizarre-she plays her character as alternating between Katharine Hepburn style independence or Celia Johnson-esque forlornness.  Neither of these things work, and while the ending is brutal (when we find out the one true love of Lydia' life never loved her the way the other three men did), and would've been a killer ending to a better movie, Lydia suffers from a lack of investment in these characters.

The film's sole Oscar nomination is unearned as well.  Miklos Rozsa was one of the finest composers of the era, a classically-trained conductor who, despite over 100 film scores, saw this as simply a "second career" to his traditional classical conducting.  His music here is lovely, but it's overbearing & doesn't fit the movie-it's too grand for such a trifle, and oftentimes feels like it's undercutting a script & acting that is not able to keep up with the film's designs.  As a result, it likely sounds terrific outside of the movie, but within the context it's a poor fit, and an unworthy citation no matter how many nominations studios were afforded in the music categories in the 1940's.

OVP: Love Letters (1945)

Film: Love Letters (1945)
Stars: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ann Richards, Cecil Kellaway, Gladys Cooper, Anita Louise
Director: William Dieterle
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Actress-Jennifer Jones, Art Direction, Score, Original Song-"Love Letters")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Jennifer Jones is not really whom you'd consider my favorite actress of the 1940's.  Her pie-eyed optimism and constant saintliness (I'm aware I still need to see Duel in the Sun, where supposedly this image should be shattered) was in direct contrast to the femme fatales, the Bette Davises and Joan Crawfords and Gene Tierneys that populated this era and my heart.  She certainly was one of Oscar's however, as she managed to scoop up five nominations, including four consecutively from 1943-1946. Love Letters is smack dab in the middle of her nominations count at number three, and was when she was one of the biggest names in Hollywood.  Under the watchful eye of her soon-to-be-husband David O. Selznick, she stars as an amnesiac (possible murderess) in this potboiler that is scripted by (of all people) Ayn Rand.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film tells the tale of Alan Quinton (Cotten...doesn't that feel like the name of every one of Joseph Cotten's characters though?) writing love letters for his caddish fellow soldier in a war that is so inconsequential they don't even bother to say which one it is (it's World War II, for the record) and we learn soon that he has fallen in love with the woman, named Victoria, whom he has been pulling a Cyrano toward.  The war ends, and we learn that the caddish soldier has died and that Alan's fiancee Helen (Louise) can't handle his PTSD and that he is clearly in love with a woman he has never met, and instead he goes off into the world, living at his aunt's house and meeting a woman named Singleton (Jones) who is clearly in love with him even as he pines for Victoria, whom he discovers has died and murdered her husband.  Singleton cannot handle this, and though Alan soon figures out that Singleton is indeed Victoria, he cannot tell her because she has amnesia and everyone thinks the shock will hurt her.  The film eventually shows that the caddish soldier was killed by her grandmother after he drunkenly hurt her granddaughter Victoria, and then Alan and Victoria, like all good 1940s romances, end up living happily ever after.

It's all as melodramatic as it sounds, and never once does it veer into a particularly compelling series of performances to make up for the sincere lack of surprise (it's quite obvious to anyone who has seen a movie before that headliner Jennifer Jones, who is far too misty to not have something going on in her head, is clearly the woman he initially fell in love with and not some other actor).  Jones and Cotten were constantly playing romantic leads in the 1940s (three of her five Oscar nominations, in fact, were for falling in love with Cotten though he never once would be noticed by the Academy, making him one of the weirdest snubs in their long history considering the pedigree of his pictures), but I see very little chemistry here to explain why.  Jones is too glass-eyed and willing to throw herself on the tracks for my taste and her character is banal and uninteresting.

The film received three other nominations on-top of Jones baffling citation, though only one of them really stands out as something that deserved the accolade.  The film has a wonderful score, written by Academy favorite Victor Young, soaring throughout and adding a dreaminess to the mystery that Ayn Rand tries to inject into the film to keep the plot running and not just making the film an hour long.  The original song, which is entirely instrumental in the film, lends credence as to why Young deserved a nomination though considering we don't get the words to the Dick Haymes hit it feels a little self-indulgent that we get a second nomination for Young's score when one would have been sufficient (it feels like mad cheating to include the film as a song nominee when words were only added later as part of a radio-friendly hit-this would never pass the music branch's tough muster now).  The film's third nomination is for art direction, and while we get many dusty old English country houses, I never actually believed we weren't on a Hollywood sound-stage, which is a pretty hard knock against a nomination in this category.

Those are really my thoughts on the disappointing Love Letters, for which I'd had much higher hopes.  I'm now just one performance (Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary's) away from finishing off the 1945 Best Actress lineup-do you have a favorite amongst them?  What are your thoughts on Love Letters' three other Oscar mentions?  And why do you think Joseph Cotten was never AMPAS' cup-of-tea?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!